RESEARCH & PRACTICE
Organic Chemistry Laboratory II | From course redesign to independent handoff
I redesigned how a course was taught, run, and improved, then made it possible for the next teaching assistant to carry it forward independently.
Work backward from the abilities students should gain
For a core group of 19 students, I reorganized a course once ordered by reaction type into a progression from background knowledge and basic operations to increasingly difficult integrated experiments and open-ended work. I independently designed or substantially rebuilt about eight experiments, and reworked preparation, lab sessions, reports, grading, and final assessment.
Let problems in the lab reshape the course
After each class, I recorded recurring mistakes in students' actual work. I distinguished one-off slips from shared gaps in understanding, then fed those observations into later explanations, lab procedures, assessment, and final-exam questions. The course changed in response to how it ran, not only to what its designer had planned.
Organize a complex experiment as three parallel flows
For a kinetics experiment involving 19 students and five teaching assistants, I divided the work into three parallel flows. I planned and numbered 91 sample vials in advance and set out the tasks, timing, and handoffs for reaction, timed sampling, quenching, processing, and GC analysis, allowing multiple people to coordinate the collection.
Leave the method behind, and prepare the next person
I led the manuscript for an organic-chemistry lab textbook, rebuilt its structure, coordinated content from about four students, and reviewed and integrated the final draft. I also built two Notion course sites. I ran the course directly for the first two semesters, trained the next teaching assistant and handed over roughly half the responsibilities in the third, and saw the successor run it independently in the fourth.
The fourth semester was operated independently by the successor. The textbook is a manuscript, not a published book.